The Film’s setting

Notes for a pedagogy of the space/environmental functions of film

Sara Iommi
University of Bologna, Italy

Abstract

The primary target of my work is to investigate the concept of film space, starting from the
meanings of words.
The terms environment and space have different meanings and different implication for film
analysis.
During the last century, the technological revolution has changed our way to conceive spatiality.
Despite Western anthropocentrism, the “age of simultaneity" brings this topic back to its
centrality.
A methodological approach based on Cultural Studies and referring to the modern European
cinema (Gilles Deleuze, in the eighties, defined it not stricly narrative and found many examples
of “empty space”) proposes interesting research material.
Increasing urbanization and space travels have a strong influence on post-modern cinema.
If the cinema is the art of visibile, it is therefore very important to investigate the relationships
between interiors and interiority and also the boundary line between imagine and imagination.
Furthermore, I am interested in the relationship between a character and background in the
meaning construction.
The aim of my study is to try to define how much the furniture and the various other objects are
relevant for the drawing of the different characters. I would investigate in what way the
geographical area, the landscapes and even the weather may reflect cultural identity and
emotional conditions.

Keywords:
Setting, Analysis of Film, Modern European Cinema, Cultural Studies, Spatiality

Introduction

The words [...] are little houses, with a cellar and an attic. Common
sense lives on the mezzanine floor [...] Climbing the stairs in the
house of the word means, step by step, abstracting. Going down into
the cellar means dreaming, means getting lost down the far-off
corridors of an uncertain etymology, means seeking never-to-be-found
1
treasures in those same words .
Gaston Bachelard

Following important scientific discoveries and what might be defined as a full-blown

technological and cultural revolution, over the last few years studies into the relationship
between mankind and the environment have become ever more pressing and important.
The 1900s was the century when Man declared geographical exploration of the planet to be
over and opened up the era of space travel, commonly defined as “post-modern”. Astronauts,
by elevating themselves above the partial nature of the human vision of terrestrial landscapes
produced by a gaze at human height, were able to observe their own writing on the planet from
the outside, by delving into the world from a point of view where human transformations of the
terrestrial crust are well nigh irrelevant. In this way observation oriented around purely
anthropocentric behaviour lost its centrality. We passed from perception to environmental
decoding. If, as a result of the late works of Heidegger2, living within a horizon assumes
centrality in the conception of truth in the sense of a belonging, then our yardstick for judging
the world and ourselves, ever varying, has inevitably undergone a profound change over the
last century. A profound change which contemporary anthropology in particular has committed

1
Gaston Bachelard, La poetica dello spazio, Dedalo, Bari, 2006, pp. 178-179 (my translation)
2
Gianni Vattimo, Prefazione, in Franco La Cecla, Perdersi. L’uomo senza ambiente, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2005, pp. VII
– VIII.
itself to investigating in depth. The cinema scholar who intends to approach this theme will
therefore need to ally his specific field of study to what we might define as an interdisciplinary
approach oriented to the tradition of Cultural Studies3.
To offer an analysis of the functions of the setting in film requires not only bearing in mind that
there is still no real taxonomy, but equally that it is necessary to start out from certain
considerations on the terminological universe that gravitates around these, beginning with the
terms space and environment, very often confused with one another.
As far as the definition of the term “space” is concerned we owe a debt to the Platonic intuition
which in The Republic defines it as an invisible but intelligible entity, within which are situated
bodies, perceptible objects, and their position. The term is derived from the Latin Spătiu(m) and
harks back to an idea of “interval”. For other destinations of linguistic use the term would also
appear to be linked to patēre (being open), an indefinite and unlimited place in which all material
things are thought to be contained. As far as the term “environment” is concerned, we can
deduce the meaning instead from the Latin word it correlates with – namely Ambiĕnte(m), pres.
part. of ambīre “going around” − which, in opposition to the idea of “being open”, constitutes the
surroundings of the personage, its very emanation by similarity, contrast or difference.
We might cite an example from the episode La Ricotta by Pier Paolo Pasolini included in the
film Ro.Go.Pa.G (1962). Natalina (a secondary character who in the film plays the part of an
extra), even though exhibiting herself in a striptease and even though seen wearing curlers,
Kirby-grips and a hair net, assumes the sacred valence of a fifteenth-century Madonna due to
the fact that she has been filmed in open close-up against the background of the hills of the
Roman countryside with those specific characteristics of Renaissance paintings4. We might well
wonder: would it be possible to confer such valence upon her without that background?
Absolutely not! This association between environment, sacredness and character expressed
thanks to the relationship of significance can be found in many other images of the Italian
director. In The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) the Virgin, placed successively in
close-up and full-figure, has an architectural element in the form of an arch looming over her
that can only remind the spectator of the famous Mandorla. In Medea (1969) it is the sun-
scorched earth which gives the female character an aura to render the idea of the sacredness
of the mythical celebrity.
During our discussion we will be able to apply this theoretical distinction through particular
sequences, dictated unquestionably by fond memories, albeit aiming at defining the constitutive
presuppositions of a taxonomy of the space/environmental functions in film.
It seemed to us indispensable to start from the origins and hence from the meaning and
etymology of the words. For instance, we have considered how often in the Judaic tradition
words materialize to become the very creation of the universe, the divine Fiat (Genesis, I). The
world identifies itself culturally with a “landscape of signs”.
Starting from those august sources we might hazard a proposal to ascribe words to the
environment category.
Extending this thinking to analysis of film and following the Spinoza-like intuition of Pasolini
(according to whom “cinema is the written language of reality” 5), we speculate: just what is
space then? We offer a definition of space starting from the transposition of the Platonic intuition
already cited (space is invisible but intelligible) to the field of film. This can be interpreted as a
relationship, which has made itself into its own element, between the things that make up the
setting. In such a way that the notion of “space” also comes to embrace the complex of
syntactic relationships. Meanwhile, cinematographic space includes meanings that are spilt into
relationships of conjunction and disjunction thanks to which it plans the passage from one
image to the next; relationships that have to be rapidly translated and decoded by the
spectator 6.

3
By “Cultural Studies” is meant that school of interdisciplinary social studies originating in Great Britain in the nineteen-
sixties which considers culture as the sum of interrelationships between various social practices. When extended to a
study of the mass media these tend to demonstrate continuous negotiation between differing communicative practices.
4
If we were to concentrate the analysis starting from the notion of space, we would have to circumscribe it exclusively
by the relationships between the Roman countryside and the images and backgrounds from Renaissance pictures,
whereas by taking that space into consideration with a value as an environment, the symbolic identification of the
character is implied.
5
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, Garzanti Editore, Milan, 2000, pp.198-226.
6
Gianni Rondolino, Mario Tomasi, Manuale del film - Linguaggio, racconto, analisi, Utet, Turin, 2005, pp. 22-30.
The confine 7 is what then transforms the natural environment, delimiting and measuring it in a
territory; this has to do with geometry, hence culture. As Pier Zanini rightly indicates, the confine
(limit) detaches space from nothingness and uncertainty, giving it a new dimension 8. In a similar
way to the limit, the edges of the cinematographic image, through acts of selection and editing,
limit the space by choosing a particular view of the world, transforming it into a setting.
The concepts of space and environment are joined by those of “place” and “city” in their
anthropological and social sense, of landscape (stratified) and territory (political). Particular
attention should be paid to the processes of urbanisation, and hence architecture, to the
valence of frontier places, and to the consequences of the advent of globalisation and the epoch
of so-called simultaneity. “Place” will therefore be considered as the terrain in which are
inscribed the signs of social links and history, as may be deduced by an analysis of “places”
(and also “non-places”) as recommended by Marc Augé9. Despite our tendency to abstraction
we are moulded by the place we live in, thus the act of living must be recognised as a primary
human faculty. What guarantees us the recognition of this horizon, however, will only be the
birth of what Giorgio Bertone defines as “excluded gaze10”. The modern era, characterised by
total standardisation to a rational, metropolitan organisation of the world, and by a parallel,
progressive exclusion of mankind by a landscape not yet completely anthropised, prompts
reflection on the latter.

Examples of analysis

A field of investigation to be given emphasis 11 in an analysis of the space/environmental

functions of film will be contemporary cinema, above all the European school. For instance,
there are the multiple functions of the empty plane (as dealt with by Gilles Deleuze12) which
indicates just how important space is simply in showing itself for the directors of the second half
of the twentieth century. A poetical practice not considered by the classical era of cinema which
implanted its expressive power above all on the plane of the filmed tale.
Deleuze again13, on the subject of his famous analysis of Carl Thoedor Dreyer’s film, The
Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), singles out how the backgrounds, only just perceptible in a film
almost entirely made up of close-ups, are transformed into pure space, something which allows
the birth of a “non-space” to allow a sort of temporal or spiritual perspective to triumph over the
atmospheric perspective. Hence Deleuze maintains that around the face it is possible to
establish a kind of non-place and that, meanwhile, through the close-up, the face can be
transformed into landscape. If the camera movements and the extreme potentiality of the planes
conceptually intersect in a common spatial expression, then we might consider, in some ways,
the function of the camera movements as being the investigation of a space, while the various
planes and fields within the fixed frame are an exploitation of the environment and landscape.
A further contribution to any investigation of the relationships between space and environment
is unquestionably offered by Michelangelo Antonioni. In the films by the director from Ferrara,
the ambivalence between the pure geometry of the framing of the image and the series of
camera movements to portray the background, are taken to a point where those same
potentialities of the filmed expression implode upon themselves. The environment, whether
social or natural, becomes a sort of “spatial environment” in which the functional signs of
figurativeness are still recognizable (we are not yet faced by a conceptual abstraction of the
image), nonetheless, these signs implode in favour of pure representation, become the material
indicativeness of an idea, become a concretion of the abstract.
Antonioni’s reflection is also useful in introducing into film analysis contemporary
anthropological research concerning the problems existing in contemporary society a propos
the (lost) relationship between mankind and the environment. Deleuze pushes this relationship

7
To this might be added a reflection on the margins of the image, indeed: For most people it is necessary to live within
a spatial situation with definite contours, precise, and hence inhabitable. Without limits the possibility of cultivating and
constructing a space vanishes. Piero Zanini, Significati del confine. I limiti naturali, storici, mentali, Bruno Mondadori
Editori, Milan, 1997, p. 51 (my translation).
8
Piero Zanini, Significati del confine, op.cit., p. 6.
9
Marc Augé, Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, La librairie du XXIe siècle, Seuil, 1992.
10
Giorgio Bertone, Lo sguardo escluso. L’idea di paesaggio nella letteratura occidentale, Interlinea, Novara, 2000.
11
We believe it vital for this study on the use of the setting in film to refer to the work of Gilles Deleuze, whose thinking
we will seek to expand upon, as well as Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis from which inspiration for the structural layout is
indirectly drawn.
12
Gilles Deleuze, L'image-mouvement. Cinéma 1, Les éditions de Minuit (coll. « Critique »), Paris, 1983.
13
Ibidem
to its extreme: that is to say, he ensures that the two subjects coincide and that Mankind is the
World. Antonioni, on the other hand, shows us the incapacity of human beings to be one with
the place they inhabit starting from the notion of the pervasive latensification in his films.
Following a progressive corrosion of the relationship between mankind and the natural
environment caused by the modern process of utilitarianism, a relationship that is extremely
conditioning, not to mention abstract, is strengthened between mankind and that socio-
economic system.
We can also find examples from the Far East that may be useful for our analysis. In the cinema
of Yasujiro Ozu the human figure seems to have been removed from its centrality. Objects
frequently riddle the field. Countless empty fields attest to this marginality. All of which works in
favour of the setting until it reaches the extremisation of a pure geometry of spatial valences, in
the refulgence of an emptiness laden with objects/memory that stand out like mysterious
epiphanies. Just one example is the red kettle in Equinox Flower (1958), this object seems an
“interiorised memory”, The casing of a deep and obscure meaning that appears to play a part in
the biography of both the characters and the filmmaker. Frequently we observe the human
figures disappearing beyond the many thresholds and leaving the shot inhabited by objects
only. A continuous movement where the delimitation of domestic spaces is provisional in that
game of mobile walls which the traditional Japanese house is, in the film visibly contrasted with
rigid modern constructions in reinforced concrete. The character almost seems confined,
isolated, even driven out or hidden by the objects of the setting. To strengthen this impression
of the loss of centrality we frequently enjoy non-conventional viewpoints.
The argument really is vast, and to be able to feel in command of it, albeit partially, we propose
a series of subthemes starting from the function of the threshold and the relationship between
the domestic environment and the characters’ interiority.

Interiors

In the course of its evolution, cinema, the art of the visible, has gradually refined its capacity to
cope with the problem of representing interiority and sentiment – and consequently its
relationship with the invisible – by means of an ever greater awareness that the phenomena of
daily life are a manifestation of this.
At this point how can we fail to recollect the father of existentialism – Søren Kierkegaard – who
described interiority as the transpiring of thought in existing.
None other than Virginia Woolf, to begin to understand quite how important intellectual reflection
is – and more generally that freeing of the imaginative faculty that can recoup events from
memory – identifies in A Room of One’s Own14, the place of freedom or protection of one’s own
intimacy and the departure point of the construction of identity and thus comparison with others.
Consequently, the interior of the house came to be developed as an expressive field of the
interiority of the persona while the figure of the threshold dons full centrality.
The house in the conception of Gaston Bachelard’s “poetics of space”, takes on strategic
importance as regards what the philosopher himself defines as a process of localising
memories 15. To this thought may also be added Franco La Cecla’s reflection on the symbolic
and slightly cryptic meaning of that typically Italian figure of speech “fare mente locale” (lit.
“making the mind local” i.e. focusing (the mind) on something): a sort of necessity for domestic
shelter, in addition to localisation, for thought16. In fact, a sense of place derives not only from
the daily practices that organize our spaces, but also from the memory that lodges there, from a
kind of thought projection. From this may be deduced an important first differential valence
between interiors and exteriors: the house becomes a shelter, a first vital space, almost a
continuance of the uterus, a place of protection not only for memories, but also the very
possibility of thinking. From this concept comes an analogy between interiors and interiority.
And the threshold, therefore, comes to position itself as a confine between interiority and
exteriority.
One of the most significant examples in this regard is without question the sub-finale of Wild
Strawberries (1957) by Ingmar Bergman. Borg’s existential journey will end with the family

14
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Penguin, London, 2008.
15
Gaston Bachelard, La poetica dello spazio, op. cit., […] the natal house is something more than just a set of rooms, it
is a corpus of dreams. Each room has been a shelter for reverie, and this has often characterized the reverie itself (my
translation).
16
Franco La Cecla, Mente Locale. Per un’antropologia dell’abitare, Elèuthera, Milan, 1995, Passim.
reconciliation − not enacted but suspended in its giving − represented through two half-open
thresholds detectable in the scene near the final resolution set in the professor’s bedroom.
Through one of the two chinks present in the environment the elderly leading character notices
his son’s return home and the daughter-in-law who comes to embrace him calling him
affectionately father; instead the other door is left ajar by the maid who, while refusing to make
use of confidential expressions in their relationships (as requested by the old doctor) to avoid
breaking social conventions, deliberately leaves the contiguous spaces of the respective rooms
in communication. The man, therefore, faced by death and after coping with a long interior and
exterior journey, finds the only possible sense of life in Bachelard’s 17 “cosmos of the half-open,
half-closed” and amends his tough ways, his self-centredness, even making the typical paternal
archetype of the Scandinavian populations vacillate. This theme had already been formulated
by the Swedish director in The Seventh Seal (1957) but in this case it is stunningly expressed
by Bergman through total control over the environmental elements and their symbolic function.
Inside the domestic space it is then the objects that contribute particularly to constructing the
character’s identity. The man, by moulding the shape of the objects stores the imagery, through
culture designs the real. In the Heidegger-like reflection, things – or rather the manipulating
relationship over things carried out by human beings – are at the centre of understanding
human existence. For the German philosopher, the basic character of man is “being in the
world” and this mainly involves taking care of the things of the world as well as others.
Consequently, the world exists as a set of usable things, things exist inasmuch as they are used
by man, while man, in turn, exists inasmuch as, by transforming the world, he is able to
transform himself in proportion to his own project. The “word”, which gives a name to things,
founds being, language is its abode. Inside the domestic space everyday things reveal a
profound contiguity with the human soul, they are deposits of memory, a material concretisation
of the uncontrollable flow of time. Objects participate in the construction of our individuality and
are moulded by it in turn. As Jean Baudrillard writes in his The System of Objects 18, following
industrialisation first of all and the ensuing advent of consumer society, objects, in the sense of
inexhaustibly reproducible products, have not only proliferated, but have, at least in part,
rescinded this function of theirs of being a safeguard and an intimate union with the individual,
inasmuch as their life has been drastically reduced following a flow of consumption that we
would like to see in constant growth. The affective value of the objects has begun to disappear,
in parallel with the disappearance of usury.
To directly enter our specific field of analysis – cinema – and reflect briefly on this relationship
between man and object and consequently between mankind and the world, we once more
need the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In fact arguably there is no better example than the
Golden Fleece of his Medea to immediately render the idea of what is meant by proposing a
difference between object-reliquary (or object-memory) and object-goods. The Golden Fleece,
as long as it remains inside a bygone territory, the Kolkhis, is made an object of rites and affects
a magical and spiritual potential. From the point at which it is found to have been purloined and
transported to sites of civilisation it becomes desecrated and turns out to be a banal goatskin,
whose only symbolism concerns exclusively material and earthly political power.
One of the directors acknowledged as being amongst the most important artists in staging a
story is unquestionably Luchino Visconti. Indeed it is impossible to remain indifferent in front of
the visual excess and the sumptuous demands needed to realize a work like The Leopard
(1963): a sort of testament to a waning social class (We were leopards and lions, those who
come after us will be jackals, hyenas 19). At the time of the Italian aristocracy the ostentation of
wealth passed through a precise need for self-representation by means of objects and, more in
general, of dwellings. In Visconti’s cinema the décor is used functionally as demonstration of a
cultural and intellectual decline as a direct consequence of social change.
As Visconti was to write in 1943 in the magazine Cinema on the relationship man/things, and on
the balancing of fullnesses and emptinesses guaranteed precisely by the presence of objects
inside spaces:
The cinema which interests me is an anthropomorphic cinema.[…] The most humble gesture of
man, his step, his hesitations and his impulses alone bring poetry and vibrations to the things
that surround him and frame him20.

17
Gaston Bachelard, La poetica dello spazio, op. cit.
18
Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des objets, Gallimard, Paris, 1968.
19
From the script of the film.
20
Luchino Visconti, Cinema Antropomorfico, in «Cinema», no. 173-174 September - October 1943 (my translation)
Here, therefore, is how the human presence makes the inanimate animate and how the latter
forms an extension of the human body and its existential drives; here is how things space
themselves according to the movements of the body.
We can think of the first shot following the opening titles of Visconti’s Conversation Piece
(1974). The professor, a man tending to isolation and tranquillity, and the owner of an apartment
bulging with antique pictures, books, statues, ceramics etc., is examining a painting that he
might be going to buy – and which will link him tragically to other characters in the story – with a
magnifying glass. Following his calm gentle gesture, the camera investigates the minimum
particulars of the object being examined, until revealing its tiniest cracks, the signs left on it by
time, the slow transformation of its picture surface. The painting portrays an eighteenth-century
family. The professor lingers over their faces, almost as if caressing them.
Apart from anything else it is well known that Visconti himself felt a deep sense of respect as
regards objects that were useful in creating a film: to the extent of always asking for period
originals and expecting, even regardless of production costs, that the drawers of certain pieces
of furniture never once opened during the unfolding of the story should be full, almost as if to
give a sense of ontological and anthropological dignity to the representation 21.
The woman who invades the main character’s tranquillity, with family and lover in her wake,
immediately manifests her extraneousness towards this love for things by declaring openly and
shamelessly that also her husband covers the walls in books, even though he has read none of
them22. In one of the opening shots of the film, she even drops a lit cigarette butt on the floor,
displaying continuous contempt for the rooms together with the people who live in them.
There is no clearer rebuff, as regards the Baudrillardian analysis of new objects originated by
the economic boom and the different relationship between man and things generated by the era
of mass consumption, than the apartment of the professor, abounding as it is in antique objects
and closed in upon itself like its owner, and the modern furnishing upstairs, as airy and bright as
it is cold, aseptic and almost hostile to any imprint of sentiment: the walls adorned with
contemporary paintings considered only as ritzy stains of colour.
The shot is the place for a dialogue between things, between things and bodies, between
bodies, things and the world. From these relationships the meanings or sentiments of the forms
are born.
Another interesting aspect to be looked at in this regard would be the relationship that exists
between writing and the oral tradition in the sense of a relationship between a dominant culture
and a plurality of cultures dominated. This argument could be coupled to the filmed
representation of objects from the peasant world, following an idea of the theatrical properties of
the everyday object23 which proposes for our investigation − shifting an analysis of film in the
direction of typically ethnographic categories − the definitions of “talking objects” and “wall
grammars”.
To Pasolini’s idea of a cinema as “writing of reality” we might link the theorising of Marshall
McLuhan who defined cinema as the last form of the civilisation of writing and considered the
24
alphabet as the sign of a hypertrophy of the visual sense . Well known is Christian Metz’s
refusal of this Pasolinian proposal. Indeed, according to the French semiologist, we may speak
of language only in the presence of phonemes and monemes, a double articulation of the
language to which Pasolini responded by likening the framing of a shot (or parts of this framing)
to the concept of the moneme and defining the objects that make it up cinèmi. The act of
construction (or simple framing) of the set is thus related to the selection we make for the
construction of sense necessary for communication in the face of the totality of an alphabet.
The investigation of cinema with a rural setting becomes even more interesting if tackled as the
field of a piece of writing: the objects represented there are by now unknown, thus they come to
our attention as words/objects of a language that risks becoming irremediably foreign to us.
One example among many can be drawn from the film by Francesco Rosi, Christ stopped at
Eboli (1979). This film is based on the novel of the same name by Carlo Levi. In the film as in
the book, the Turin writer who is the main character of the plot is condemned to internal exile by
the Fascist authorities. Once he has arrived in the southern Italian village he was sent to, he

21
Renzo Renzi, Visconti Segreto, Laterza, Bari, 1994, p 232.
22
Here is how the antique object is transformed into a functional, efficient object, but lacking a lifespan and an affective
dialogue, an identity rapport with its possessor. Produced in series, apart from everything else it lacks individuality, a
direct rapport with its creator.
23
In this case the debt is towards an institution like the Ettore Guatelli Museum [of country life] and the categories
proposed, amongst others, by Prof. Mario Turci who directs it and all the people who gravitate around it, must be
recognized.
24
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An inventore of Effects, Gingko Press, Berkeley CA, 2001
notices above the doors of the houses some large black drapes which frame the threshold. In
the novel, Levi explains that these are funeral palls hung as a sign of mourning for the death of
someone dear. The film, “art of the visible”, also manages to take note of the various gradations
of colour due to the more or less prolonged exposure to the sunlight and thereby indicating the
period more or less recent of the passing. These vestments find an echo in the black kerchiefs
that crown the faces of the women introduced to the spectator while, in contrast with the
repeated symbols of death, they find themselves busy with winnowing the crops. These objects
appear as the silent words of a language, a dialect, by now almost utterly vanished.
These black or grey borders, some even bleached – just as memory too inevitably becomes
bleached – become the signs of a writing of time, of a chromatic gradation of pain. This
distressing palette is certainly dominated by chance, by destiny, but rediscovers a cultural
coding in the repetition of magic rituals that open up dialogues with transcendent worlds.

Exteriors

If the confine harks back to a concept of space that is limited and therefore transformed into
place by demands that are typically social or geopolitical, inversely the landscape is close to the
idea of environment. Which is doubly relevant if we think that cinema, being an art linked to
photographic reality, conceives the space within the shot as a setting: at every “…and action” it
transforms the environment into a setting.
Clearly, by the term “environment” we are not only referring to the representation of natural
landscapes; the concept extends to the social environment and in any event to all human
manifestations that lead contemporary anthropology to conceive of landscape itself, even when
agricultural, as a stratification, a writing from multiple readings. That interweaving between
history and nature that is specific to landscape is, plainly, much stronger in European cinema:
which is due to the fact that in Europe a natural, uncontaminated environment is practically
absent, while the sentiment of “wilderness” is much more frequent in American cinema. In the
immensity of the panoramas in the far west, in fact, huge swathes still subsist where there is no
trace of human transformation.
In the advent of the perception of landscape (a term, the latter, which necessarily implies a
reading of the environment, hence an attitude of aesthetic awareness) can actually be
recovered a distinctive element regarding the birth of modern civilisation.
The term “environmentalism” refers to studies of various kinds that attribute to environmental
factors various types of influence on human behaviour. The concept of environmentalism is
therefore linked twice over to the process of human beings’ adaptation to nature.
As Sandro Bernardi has pointed out in his Il Paessaggio nel Cinema Italiano (Landscape in
Italian cinema) 25, at the dawning of cinema the novelty of reproducing reality in movement was
so strong, that spectators went to the movie theatre not only to watch something, but to watch
themselves looking. Cinema, in its re-presentation of reality, enjoyed a relationship with
absence which those watching were not yet inured to. The setting alone filled the frame. Here
we are thinking in particular of those city panoramas and exotic landscapes of the Lumière
catalogues, which in a Utopian way attempted to imprison the world and its differences in
moving images produced via squads of cinematographic operators. In these first films ranks of
human beings were put forward, passing before our gaze without any figure being able to
acquire a specific weight that was greater than the others. The figure of the leading character
was not yet born. The shot was caught in its two-dimensionality, flat inasmuch as non-
hierarchical. The human figure had not yet assumed a particular significance compared to the
background, it was all background, the sole leading character that might be hypothesized was
the spectator alone.
Only following the birth of narrative cinema, and therefore the invention of the lead character,
did the setting come effectively to find itself behind the human figure, who by this time
dominated its centre: the hierarchical planes had multiplied. All of a sudden the anthropocentric
cinema had become aware of the background.
On reaching its mature phase, narrative cinema made the most of the environment in order to
psychologically bring the character to life.

25
Sandro Bernardi, Il Paesaggio nel Cinema Italiano, Marsilio, Venice, 2002, We are indebted to this text above all for a
fascinating analysis of Antonioni’s work on the theme of the setting, but also its proposal of the rapid evolution of the
figure of the background as a result of various chapters in the history of the cinema.
Lastly, the advent of the cinema of modernity was to give birth to an “aware landscape” − aware
of its own importance thanks to a sort of reflective gaze and procedures of narrative
deconstruction that were to cause a crisis not only for the classic narrator, but also for the
audience, with their traditional centrality undermined. What we are interested in highlighting is a
rupture between the diegetic space and the places of cinema, the gradual awareness of the
importance of landscape − in particular thanks to its atmospheric manifestations − to the human
figure.
Our analysis of meteorological events in cinema within our discussion will concentrate on one
particular scene in the film The Wind (1928), by Victor Sjöström, in which a woman moves to a
village in the American desert where the wind never stops blowing.
The house is constantly invaded by dust, all the objects are sprinkled with it, and paradoxically,
the woman uses dust to wash the dishes. The main character cannot get used to this extreme
climate and is constantly terrorized. In one scene near the end, she remains alone in the house
while a storm rages outside. Certain signs make it evident that her perception of reality,
assaulted by her fear, is beginning to alter. The woman’s terror is expressed through the
contrasting light of a lamp that never stops moving, filling the small environment with a macabre
dance of shadows. The debt to expressionism is clear, but there is a particular grammatical
construction that indicates a maturity of language upon which we wish to focus attention since it
seems to us even to anticipate stylistic choices that are typical of Antonioni’s cinema and to
achieve a quantum leap in the conception of the environment as the main character (or
antagonist). The wind becomes more and more oppressive. It seems as if the interiors are
starting to give way. The storm filters through gaps in the walls, breaks the window panes, even
seems to transmute into an anthropomorphic entity inasmuch as, through the wooden boards
hanging in front of the door, it appears to possess human intentionality and with an arm and
fists of wind even seems to be knocking at the door. The wind ends up overturning a lamp
which starts a fire. At this point the terrified woman’s vision begins to oscillate. Deceived by a
fade, from the position of the woman and the movements of her head we believe ourselves to
be in front of her “point of view”. The camera proceeds with a lateral movement towards the left
that imitates her estrangement but, after some seconds, goes to frame the main character. In
this way we find ourselves in front of a false POV. It seems almost that the director wants to
offer us a POV shot of the environment that has acquired the capacity for action and decision to
the extent of being seen in the first person. Even following the happy ending, where a sort of
reconciliation with the wind is proposed, a personification of the latter continues to be made: it is
even attributed characteristics of justice. To us it seems legitimate to consider this scene as a
nodal point in the history of cinema: a moment when the meteorological action (and through it
the setting) is no longer solely a clarification of the character’s sentiments, just as it is no longer
in the service of the narration, but seems to have adopted a genuine strength of will all its own.
These themes are particularly dear to Scandinavian cinema, characterized by what we might
define as a continuous longing to flee from the north. The landscape, through its meteorological
phenomena, often proposes itself as an antagonist and stops, or tries to stop, the deeds of the
main characters. Many examples could be given.
The false POV shot we found in The Wind is used frequently and with greater awareness in the
cinema of Antonioni, in which, as Sandro Bernardi writes, the landscape’s viewpoint (or that of
the camera) corresponds to a loss of vision by the characters who are inserted into a context of
bourgeois class that implies a distancing from nature in favour of behaviour with economic
objectives. In particular, in The Girl Friends (1955), we find a link to our discourse on the wind, a
wind that allows nature to manifest itself, a nature which in turn looks towards what the
characters are no longer able to see. In this work a group of friends of a high social level are on
a trip to the beach; both the men and the women are bored and utterly unable to notice in the
beauty of the winter sea, the unspoken sacredness – if we like – as the poetic and aesthetic
side of reality (if we exclude feeble attempts in this direction by the woman who ends up killing
herself and the artist).
Nature suppresses the centrality of man to the extent of making the character vanish as is the
case for Anna in The Adventure (1960); here too we are present at a disappearance linked to a
change in the weather: clouds, waves and wind constantly allude to the active presence of
nature and infer a disturbing sense of the invisible which manifests through the effects of natural
forces on things, of the unknown that surrounds us on all sides but which we are unable to
recognize. It is thanks to the techniques of narrative deconstruction that fractures on the
possible open up.
The same thing happens in the case of the corpse in Blow-Up (1966), as if encircled by the
grass of the park which already in its state as a “natural artificial environment” it forces us to
reflect on the relationship between nature and culture. The mechanical vision of the cine-
camera helps us to become aware of the subjectivity of our vision, a fact made particularly
evident through the use of different lenses. The cinema of Antonioni is a continuous invitation to
observe the landscape, a seeking which we are unable to see, lying beyond our certainties as
westerners, within the ambit of the existing, like the many possibilities that open onto reality.
In the cinema of Antonioni the wind is the invisible essence that makes the landscape manifest
to human attention by shattering its immobility; it makes it active and proposes a contrast
between nature and culture which is (not) resolved in an environmental conflict.
Clearly, nowadays it is impossible to deal with the environment unless in relation to a socio-
ecological approach to the analysis of film. Following the argumentation of Eugenio Turri26, who
finds in neo-capitalist, post-industrial society a dialectic between city and countryside and
between history and ecology, we now seek out the signs of this social change and of a sort of
“non-pacified” landscape in cinema (so very different from the Italian proto-industrial agrarian
landscape decanted by Emilio Sereni27).
In the work of the brothers Mika and Aki Kaurismäki the crisis of the main characters is often
caused by a degradation of the landscape due to industrialisation and the consequent flight
from the countryside: the directors look on helplessly at a process that removes space from
nature. The metropolitan suburbs sprawl out and the Kaurismäki look with particular attention at
the human being pushed to the very margins of the new social organisation that comes to be
created. Their films are deeply imbued with the culture and spirit of Finland; in their works there
is a profound crisis of that typical aesthetic exploitation of landscape that characterizes
nineteenth-century artistic representations and, in particular, the so-called “views” of Nordic
naturalism. The landscape takes upon itself the transformations (often the wounds) of the
historical process.
A masterpiece of a film setting in city suburbs must be Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma
(1962).
The city presents itself as a sectarian space and the dislocation of its quarters is functional to
the description of class relations and the aspiration of the suburban inhabitants to surmount
these.
The city is shown as an organism in constant evolution. There are panoramas that include
building sites, ruins and rubble which afford different readings. In his Time in Ruins Marc Augé
contrasts the “natural” landscape, in which human destinies are confused in an extended and
indistinct temporal duration, to the landscape of ruins. Nature, considered as the absence of
historicising signs due to human intervention, seems to annul every immediately recognizable
temporal anchorage. Equally, the landscape of ruins harks back to a hyper-historicized sense of
the past, “it alludes intellectually to a multiplicity of pasts”28.
In Pasolini’s film, nature and ruins are intimately linked and collaborate in caging the individual
in a reiterated destiny, as if the present were the materialisation of a historical cage that
imprisons individual destinies. On the edges of the city the kids appropriate the no-man’s-land −
or better these spaces belonging to no one appropriate them − and that remnant of unkempt
meadow, which acts as a margin to the suburbs, swallows the ruins and with them their hope of
social redemption. The building site is constructing a modernity and a homogenising present
(the illusion of post-war reconstruction). The dome of Saint Peter’s looming over the horizon
during the tragic finale recalls the main character of the arrogance of power. Mamma Roma
believes she can build a future for her son and overcome a class logic, but she is deluding
herself. The kids destined for “social defeat” can do no more than inhabit the ruins. In this way,
an indefinite past is substituted by an insuperable present. Both the suburban building sites and
the ruins lose their characteristics of sociality and historicity typical of “places” and are
transformed into “spaces”, in an eternal present to which the working-class suburban kids,
whose future is denied them, are confined forever.

An impossible conclusion
Brief considerations on the non-visible and non-filmable

26
Eugenio Turri, Antropologia del paesaggio, Marsilio, Venice, 2008, pp. 18-23.
27
In this regard, for those who wish to delve deeper into the subject, we recommend the superb work (in Italian) by
Emilio Sereni: Storia del Paesaggio Agrario Italiano, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2008.
28
Marc Augé, Le temps en ruines, Galilée, Paris, 2001 (my translation)
One important application of the spatial analysis of film can be found in the field of the two poles
of denied representation: the non-visible and the non-filmable.
We shall evoke certain characteristics attributable to deeper research. As far as the non-visible
is concerned, it is necessary to consider the functions of what lies beyond the field (the four
walls of the picture as an ever partial look at the world), the audience space, the sound
architecture. It would equally be possible to ascribe to this category a discourse on spaces
denied in a censorial sense or even one of conservation and philological respect: the bulk of the
film lost or deteriorated, formats no longer used, copies with gaps, lost works, alternative
editions, and so forth 29.
The cinema of “found footage” rediscovers pro-film places that have been lost or buried in some
archive, reinterprets them and reinserts them within a new context, connecting – thanks to the
organisation of materials provided by the editing – places (and viewpoints) that are foreign to
one another through potential new meanings. The interstices the joins confer upon the
materials new temporal dimensions, new depths of sense. The black photogram, as a space
that assimilates all the colours of the spectrum and as a moment of waiting for the audience,
might place itself, rather than as a denied place, as a place of potency from which all the stories
of light can burst forth.
The reign of space is equally that which involves the non-filmable sphere: everything that
regards an immemorial memory and a limit to what can be said and shown.
The greatest challenge cinema has given itself has been the representation of the
unrepresentable: the massacre. In the case of the horror of the Second World War represented
in Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais and the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as
portrayed by Akira Kurosawa in Rhapsody in August (1991) both individuals and history have
found themselves coming to terms directly with the unspeakable. “You don’t know how to forget,
you don’t know how to remember”. From the symbols of death themselves – “Entire heads of
hair lost, Iron burnt like flesh” 30, bodies become earthen, eyes of fire in the heavens – to the
East and the West the same insurmountable pain is felt starting from the same necessity of an
immemorial memory.
Death therefore is one of the poles of the non-filmable. As we know well, for Bazin death is one
of the taboos of cinema. Being the only moment for antonomasia, there is something immoral in
allowing it to be reiterated because of the reproducibility that for cinema is structural31. In fact, in
this way, death becomes material. Many directors have tackled this theme and the expressive
solutions found have been many and varied: Angelopoulos understands that death can only be
evoked and, in his Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), he leaves it lost behind the fog, amplified by primitive
laments, as if non-human; Dreyer dealt with a dialectic between visible and invisible by
operating the resurrection of Inger in The Word (1955), or by proposing a subjectivity of the
corpse in Vampyr (1932); for Tarkovsky death, quite simply, does not exist32.
If a conclusion and therefore a classification of the space/environmental functions of film cannot
be put forward here, we must conclude with the only possible finale: namely, a death which
appears to us particularly significant of the relationship between material and immaterial
(filmable and non-filmable/immanence and transcendence).
We are speaking of the finale to Last Days (2005) by Gus van Sant. Through the window of the
garden shed a man discovers the corpse of Blake (the film was inspired by the last days of Curt
Cobain, the leader of the rock group Nirvana). His soul – the only special effect in the entire film
(as if not citing at this point the Schraderian abjuration of the soul-effect) – detaches itself from
his body. With difficulty this body/soul stands up and, instead of levitating in the air as the worst
kind of cinematography on the paranormal has accustomed us to, it climbs along the grate and
disappears harrowingly beyond the upper margin of the frame.
“Either be immortal and unexpressed or express oneself and die” 33.

Main Bibliography

RENZI, Renzo (1994) - Visconti segreto, Laterza, Rome-Bari, ISBN-13: 9788842043775, 363 pp.

29
Michele Canosa, Per una teoria del restauro cinematografico, in Storia del cinema mondiale, vol. XII, Part II, Einaudi,
Turin, 2001, pp. 1069 – 1118 (in the Sole24ore editions, Milan, 2009).
30
Lines from Rhapsody in August.
31
André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Ed. du Cerf, Paris, 1976.
32
Tullio Masoni, Paolo Vecchi, Andrej Tarkovskij, Il castoro, Milan, 1997, p.11
33
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, op.cit. p.247.
AAVV - Architecture, décor et cinéma, Cinémaction, ISBN-13: 9782854808797,167 pp.
ZANINI, Piero (1997) - Significati del confine, Bruno Mondandori, Milan, ISBN-13: 9788842494256, 183
pp.183
BROOK, Peter (1998) - (trad.it) Lo spazio vuoto, Bulzoni, Rome, ISBN-13: 9788883192890, pp.148
BAZIN, André (1999) - (trad.it) Che cosa è il cinema?, Garzanti, Milan, ISBN-13: 9788811674580, 333 pp.
PRAVADELLI, Veronica (2000) - Il cinema di Luchino Visconti, Biblioteca di Bianco & Nero, ISBN:
8831774441, 341 pp.
th
DELEUZE, Gilles (2000) - (trad.it) L'immagine-movimento, 4 ed., Ubulibri, Milan, ISBN-13:
9788877480347, 268 pp.
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PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (2000) - Empirismo eretico, 3 ed., Garzanti, Milan, ISBN-13: 9788811675440, 301
pp.
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BERTONE, Giorgio (2000) - Lo sguardo escluso. L’idea di paesaggio nella letteratura occidentale, 2 ed.,
Interlinea, Novara, ISBN-13: 9788882122348, 265 pp.
THOMAS, Deborah (2001) - Reading Hollywood. Spaces and Meanings in American Film, Wallflower,
London and New York, ISBN-13: 9781903364017, 128 pp.
MANZOLI, Giacomo (2001) - Voce e silenzio nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pendragon, Bologna,
ISBN-13: 9788883420801, 180 pp.
McLUHAN, Marshall (2002) - (trad.it) Gli strumenti del comunicare. Mass media e società moderna, Il
Saggiatore, Milan, ISBN-13: 9788851520298, 383 pp.
CHATMAN, Seymour (2003) - (trad.it) Storia e discorso. La struttura narrativa nel romanzo e nel film, Il
Saggiatore, Milano, ISBN-13: 9788851520717, pp. 321
FARINELLI, Franco (2003) - Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo, Einaudi, Turin, ISBN-13:
9788806160203, 237 pp.
th
BERNARDI, Sandro (2004) - Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano, 2 ed., Marsilio, Venice, ISBN-13:
9788831779630, 212 pp.
AUGÉ, Marc (2004) - (trad.it) Rovine e macerie. Il senso del tempo, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, ISBN-13:
9788833915166, 139 pp.
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Juillet-août, 6-8, ISSN: 02462-557.
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263 pp.
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144 pp.
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9788842020943, pp. 499

Filmography

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Carl Theodor Dreyer, France

The Wind (1928), Victor Sjöström, USA
Vampyr (1932), Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany
The Girl Friends (1955) Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy
The Word (1955), Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark
Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais, France
The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman, Sweden
Wild Strawberries (1957), Ingmar Bergman, Sweden
Equinox Flower (1958), Yasujirô Ozu, Japan
The adventure (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy | France
Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy | France
Mamma Roma (1962), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy
The Leopard, Luchino Visconti (1963), Italy | France
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy | France
Medea (1969), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy | France | West Germany
Blow-Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni, UK | Italy | USA
Conversation Piece (1974), Luchino Visconti, Italy | France
Christ stopped at Eboli (1979), Francesco Rosi, Italy | France
Rhapsody in August (1991), Akira Kurosawa, Japan
Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Theodoros Angelopoulos, Greece | France | Italy | Germany | UK | Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia | Bosnia and Herzegovina | Albania | Romania
Last Days (2005), Gus Van Sant, USA